FM4 B Spectatorship - Popular Film and Emotional Response: The Crying Game

• To Consider the conflict in Northern Ireland as a context for Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game.
• Watch the first thirty minutes of the film The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) and make notes 

The Crying Game (1992)
Miramax Films

DIRECTOR: Neil Jordan
CAST: Stephen Rea, Jaye Davidson, Miranda Richardson, Jim Broadbent, and Forest Whitaker
RATED: R
RUNTIME: 112 min.

Homework: Research the history of 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland. Produce a power point which should be e-mailed to Tony Ealey_A@sjd.ac.uk by Thursday 26.01.17

Across the barricades n ireland background from aealey

The Crying Game (UK, 1992) raises in a challenging way the critical issue of how the
myriad dynamics of race, nation and gender come together. The film, written and directed by Neil
Jordan, deals with the Troubles in Northern Ireland by combining the genres of thriller and a love
story. Although the director, Jordan, is Irish, the film was produced in Britain like many films
centering on the Northern Irish conflict.

Jordan's choice of two British blacks to play the main roles in the film
makes, for instance, the "Troubles" and nationalism a more complex issue than if it were reduced
solely to a British or Irish question. Moreover, in an interview Neil Jordan has noted that black
British soldiers were the first people of colour most Irish had ever seen.3 The question of
national identity becomes more complex since Jody, the agent of British military power, is black
and originally from a former British colony, Antigua.

The Crying Game intertwines the problematics of race and colonialism
because both the Irish and the blacks have been racialized in British colonial history. Celts have
been classified as an inferior "dark" and violent race. Especially, since Carlyle, the Irish have
been referred to as "white niggers". This representation of Irishness as a violent and barbarous
"race" still haunts British filmic interpretations of the Northern Irish question.

The Press at that time – and still today –represented the IRA (The Irish Republican Army) as mindless assassins who were cowardly because they would not wear a uniform, fight face-to-face or show their faces to their enemies – the British Army and the Ulster Constabulary. The British Army were represented as heroes who were keeping the peace on the streets of Belfast and who prevented the Republicans (those who wanted Northern Ireland to be self-ruling) from inflicting their political ideologies on the Loyalists (those who wanted British Rule of Northern Ireland to continue).

What Jordan tried to do in the film was to suggest that perhaps one of the reasons why the Anglo/Irish dispute had been maintained for so many years was because of one of the less savoury aspects of human nature: i.e. the capacity to demonstrate deep and indelible prejudice towards all those who seem to be ‘different’ to what is considered to be the ‘norm*.’ He achieved this by confronting the audience with a number of character ‘types’ about whom the audience would have certain stereotypical views and about whose behaviour they would make certain assumptions. Then, throughout the film, he used these characters and the way they interacted to challenge the audiences’ prejudices and assumptions and possibly make them think about where they had derived such views in the first place.

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*What is ‘normal’ is always dependent on the dominant ideologies of given cultures and societies and in Britain, for example, the dominant ideology has long been Conservative, White, Protestant and Masculine. Those who have a stake in maintaining the power of such an ideology are sometimes referred to as ‘The Establishment’ i.e. the powerful and elite members/decision-makers of British society who most benefit/profit from an ideology that maintains their interests. A complex and subtle number of processes are always at play in society, which lead to most members and levels of society agreeing with the dominant ideology and unwittingly helping to secure the power of the Establishment.
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Watch the first thirty minutes of the film The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) and make notes so that you can answer the following questions:

1. How are Jude and Jody presented to the audience as characters in the opening scene at the fairground in rural Northern Ireland?  

2. Compare Fergus’s actions and attitudes in the fairground scene through to the moment when he removes Jody’s hood and begins to converse with him? Do they change in any way and if so how?

3. Fergus guards Jody while the IRA waits to hear whether the British will accept their demand to have IRA prisoners released in exchange for Jody’s release. Look at this scene closely and consider what is significant about it. Also, how are Jude and Fergus contrasted in these scenes? 

4. Before he is led to his execution Jody tells Fergus the story of the Frog and the Scorpion. What is that story and why do you think it might be significant to the message of this film?